Living the Good Life, Episode 120 (March 16, 2019): Okay week for me personally, not so good for others…

God damn…it shoulda been a pretty nice week, because the weather is lovely–it seems like winter is finally releasing its grip and spring has arrived where I am. But bad news from New Zealand cast a pall over this week, making it hard to feel to good about much of anything. And though it’s a MUCH more minor thing, so much so it seems uncouth to even mention it, one of the crowdfunded projects I’ve backed seems to have shot itself in the foot. As usual, here’s what I’ve been up to so you can see why I said this was an otherwise good week, I’ll describe the bad stuff later:

WATCHAN:

Jojo ep. 22: New OP, I didn’t like it as much as the old one. So the team is staying in Venice for a little while, and despite their predicament, they’re just screwing around, like beating up a random guy while they’re eating at a restaurant because they thought he was an assassin. But Narancia also says he doesn’t want to involve Trish in fighting the mysterious boss of Passione, and then Trish mentions it’s okay, she knows that her own father tried to kill her. Strong girl. She also mentions that he might have been from Sardinia, so that’s where they go next. But before they can, Narancia’s attacked by some kind of Stand fish in the soup he’s eating, and while Giorno manages to rescue him, it’s enough to tell them they’re being hunted by the REAL assassins, who seem to be a couple of gay dudes, Tiziano and Squalo–like, I think they’re a bona-fide couple. Hmm, though Jojo is known for being camp, I guess Araki genuinely wanted to portray some gay characters in his work, I suppose that’s progressive.

Anyways, Narancia starts trying to throw his friends off the track of the enemy stand…it seems like it somehow managed to control his voice or something. It seems like there’s one stand, Crush, which is the shark thing, but the other guy has a “Talking Mouth” stand that works in tandem with it, and controls people’s tongues! So Narancia is working against his friends, against his will! The shark stand, Crush, works by traveling through liquid, so Narancia tries to get his friends away from any source of water, but Talking Mouth expands Narancia’s tongue, turning it into a tentacle and taking a knife that slices his hand. Narancia uses his stand to generate fire to cauterize the wound, but there’s a little drop of water nearby, and the shark stand, Crush, uses it to attack Giorno! Damn…

See, everything was going really well–yeah, there had been a delay, but not much of one, and everyone was feeling super enthusiastic about the project–but then, on Tuesday, a tragedy occurred.

Snapshot games, the developer of Phoenix Point, went back on their word to provide the game on Steam at launch, and instead told us they’d been paid a lot of money to provide Phoenix Point as exclusive content to a really shady, sleazy competing storefront, the Epic Games Store.

😦

Just like that, with one decision, the project has been pretty much completely derailed, at least in terms of the community it’s built up. A lot of folks are fleeing the forums and the subreddit, asking for refunds, and so on. I don’t think I’ll be getting a refund, as they say I’ll be getting a steam key AND an epic key eventually, but still…PP was one of my favorite projects, one of the few of my “big name” Kickstarter projects I could say was looking to be a total success. I had faith in Julian Gollop, but he seems to have sold me and other X-COM fans out. I guess I can see why he did it, since Epic was offering him so much money, but it still hurts, and I can’t bring myself to feel as enthusiastic about the project as I once did. Ugh…

WRITAN:

Again, not much, been distracted by other things. The Phoenix Point news sucked, but it’s just a videogame…in New Zealand, on the other hand, damn…the worst bit of terrorist activity I think that country has ever had. What a horrible crime, and thinking about it has kept me a little depressed and unable to work too much. Maybe I’ll take it easy next week, maybe not. We’ll see. In any case, here’s hoping things are better for the world next week…jeez. So many evil people in the world these days.

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